Sakonnet
BECAUSE THIS WAS a visit and a return, I might have had the nerve, right at the beginning, to call it “Sakonnet Point Revisited” and take my lumps on the Victorianism and sentimentality counts, though half a page of murder and sex at the end would bail that out. If you are to cultivate a universal irony, as Edmund Wilson told Scott Fitzgerald to do, you must never visit anything in your works, much less revisit, ever.
But when you go back to a place where you spent many hours of childhood, you find that some of it has become important, if not actually numinous, and that universal irony might just have to eat hot lead for the moment, because there is no way of suppressing that importance. Also, there is the fact of its being no secret anyway. A Midwestern childhood is going to show, for instance, even after you have retired from the ad agency and are a simple crab fisherman by the sea, grave with Winslow Homer marineland wisdom. Sooner or later someone looks into your eyes and sees a flash of corn and automobiles, possibly even the chemical plant at Wyandotte, Michigan. You can’t hide it.
Still, there was one thing certainly to be avoided: to wit, the notion when you go back to the summer place everything seems so small. You protest: “But when I got there, everything did seem small.…”
Don’t say it! The smallness of that which is revisited is one of the touchstones of an underground literature in which the heart is constantly wrung by the artifacts of childhood. Undermining it would be like shooting Barbie.
I had neared Sakonnet Point thinking, This place is loaded with pitfalls, and I had visualized a perfect beach of distant memory now glittering with mercury, oiled ducks, aluminum, and maybe one defunct-but-glowing nuclear submarine. And I met my expectations at my first meal in the area: “the Down East Clam Special.” The cook’s budget had evidently been diverted into the tourist effluvium inspired by the American Revolution that I’d seen in the lobby. The clams in my chowder and fritters and fried clams were mere shadows of their former selves, calling into question whether they had ever been clams at all.
On my plate was universal irony in parable form, come to haunt me. I knew at that moment that I had my imaginative rights. As a result, I actually returned to Sakonnet Point half thinking to see the whalers of the Pequod striding up from their dories to welcome me. And, truly, when I saw the old houses on the rocky peninsula, they fitted the spangled Atlantic around them at exactly the equipoise that seems one of the harmonics of childhood.
I had my bass rod in the car and drove straight to Warren’s Point. There was a nice shore-break surf and plenty of boiling whitewater that I could reach with a plug. Nevertheless, I didn’t rush it. I needed a little breakthrough to make the pursuit plausible. When fishing on foot, you have none of the reassurances that the big accoutrements of the sport offer. No one riding a fighting chair on a John Rybovich sportfisherman thinks about not getting one in quite the same terms as the man on foot.
Before I began, I could see on the horizon the spectator boats from the last day of the America’s Cup heading home. The Goodyear blimp seemed as stately in the pale sky as the striped bass I had visualized as my evening’s reward.
I began to cast, dropping the big surface plug, an Atom Popper, into the whitewater around boulders and into the tumbling backwash of waves. I watched the boats heading home and wondered if Gretel had managed a comeback. During the day I had learned that an old friend of the family was in Fall River recovering from a heart attack and that his lobster pots still lay inside the course of the cup race. I wondered about that and cast until I began to have those first insidious notions that I had miscalculated the situation.
But suddenly, right in front of me, bait was in the air and the striped green-and-black backs of bass coursed through it. It is hard to convey this surprise: bait breaking like a small rainstorm and, bolting through the frantic minnows, perhaps a dozen striped bass. They went down at the moment I made my cast and reappeared thirty feet away. I picked up and cast again, and the same thing happened. Then the fish vanished.
I had missed the chance by not contriving an interception. I stood on my rock and rather forlornly hoped the surprise would happen again. To my immediate right, baitfish were splashing out of the water, throwing themselves up against the side of a sea-washed boulder. It occurred to me, slowly, that they were not doing this out of their own personal sense of sport. So I lobbed my plug over, made one turn on the handle, hooked a striper, and was tight to the fish in a magical burst of spray. The bass raced around among the rocks and seaweed, made one dogged run toward open water, then came my way. When he was within twenty feet, I let him hang in the trough until another wave formed, then glided the fish in on it and beached him.
The ocean swells and flattens, stripes itself abstractly with foam and changes color under the clouds. Sometimes a dense flock of gulls hangs overhead and their snowy shadows sink into the green, translucent sea.
Standing on a boulder amid breaking surf that is forming offshore, accelerating and rolling toward you is, after awhile, like looking into a fire. It is mesmeric.
All the time I was here I thought of my uncle Bill, who had died the previous year and in whose Sakonnet house I was staying, as I had in the past. He was a man of local fame as a gentleman and a wit. And he had a confidence and a sense of moral precision that amounted to a mild form of tyranny. But for me his probity was based almost more on his comic sense than on his morality, though the latter was considerable.
He was a judge in Massachusetts. I have heard that in his court one day two college students were convicted of having performed a panty raid on a girls’ dormitory. My uncle sentenced them to take his charge card to Filene’s department store in Boston and there “exhaust their interest in ladies’ underwear,” before reporting back to the court.
He exacted terrific cautions of my cousin Fred, my brother John, and me, and would never, when I fished here as a boy, have allowed me to get out on the exposed rocks I fished from now. His son Fred and I were not allowed to swim unguarded, carry pocketknives, or go to any potentially dangerous promontory to fish, a restriction that eliminated all the good places.
And he had small blindnesses that may have been infuriating to his family, for all I know. To me they simply made him more singular. By today’s standards or even those of the time, he was rather unreconstructed, yet this renders him an infinitely more palpable individual in my memory than the adaptable nullities who have replaced men like him.
His discomfiture will be perceived in the following: One day he invited Fred and me to his court in Fall River. To his horrified surprise, the first case before him was that of a three-hundred-pound lady, the star of an all-night episode of le sexe multiple, and included a parade of abashed sailors who passed before Fred’s and my astounded eyes at the behest of the prosecution. Unrepentant, the lady greeted the sailors with a heartiness they could not return.
After the session for the day, my uncle spirited us to Sakonnet to reflect upon the verities of nature. For us, at the time, nature was largely striped bass and how to get them. But the verity of a fat lady and eleven sailors trapped in the bell jar of my uncle Bill’s court fought for our attention on equal footing.
I hooked another bass at the end of a long cast. Handsome to see them blast a plug out at the end of your best throw. I landed the fish as the sun fell, reaching through foam to seize the vigorous creature.